10 Ways The Most Successful Creatives Handle Stress

It’s never a great feeling for creatives to handle too much stress all at once. This only leads to further anxiety and feelings of failure.

And yet, most highly creative people naturally experience large amounts of stress.

In this article, we will be going over the best ways successful creatives handle stress, so you can try their methods.

Simply put, it all comes down to setting a positive mindset and acknowledging mistakes. The more you do to counter stress, the less anxious you will feel as a creative individual.

Why Is It Hard to Deal With a Burnout?

When dealing with a burnout, you can feel physically and mentally exhausted. This can often fill you with negative energy and promote a sense of failure, which can be devastating.

However, a burnout also serves as a sign from your mind and body that it’s time to take a break. Although it may be hard to stay positive during a burnout, keeping a calm mindset will help you overcome it.

What to Do When Experiencing a Burnout

Everyone goes through a burnout at some point or another, which can involve exhaustion, lack of focus, frustration, stress, and a variety of health problems.

However, there are plenty of things you can do to counter a burnout and keep moving forward. Below, we will be talking about the most common ways you can move past a burnout and better prevent them in the future.

1. Relax, Breathe, and Take It Easy

A burnout begins when you start feeling stressed and anxious. To help prevent this from happening, allow yourself a few moments each day to take it easy and relax.

This is an often overlooked yet vital component to your physical and mental health, and one of the best ways to relax is to do a five minute meditation session.

That’s right. Focus on your breath for a mere five minutes and you’ll feel much more relaxed.

Since it’s only five minutes, you’ll have fewer excuses not to do it and it will fit into even the busiest of days.

2. Make Sleep a Top Priority

Sleep is incredibly important to healthier functioning every day. Lacking high quality, deep sleep is one of the biggest factors to causing stress, which can lead to a burnout.

Even if you are having a hard time sleeping, lying in bed can help relax your mind and body, possibly easing you into a much-needed rest.

3. Say No (Way) More Often

Whether you like it or not, successful people have mastered saying the word no. Many enjoy using this word to help prevent potential burnouts, especially in particularly stressful settings.

However, the majority of people can feel too intimidated or scared to say no and end up falling into a burnout. Do yourself a favour and start saying the word ‘no’ more often — it will help you more than you think.

4. Unplug

Though technology has made our lives easier in a lot of ways, it can also increase the amount of stress people feel on a daily basis.

When we have access to everything all the time, it can be too tempting to continue checking your messages and take your work home with you.

But the fact is, constantly checking your messages causes your brain to be overstimulated, which can result in dopamine deficiency. If you feel totally unmotivated, mildly depressed, or like your creativity has reached an end, those are signs that you may be deficient in dopamine and it’s time to step away from the screens for a while.

To limit stress, try disconnecting and unplugging from your devices. Turn off your phone, resist the urge to check your email, and put away your laptop. Leave your work in the office.

If you really must use technology, use an app like Flux on your computer (Night Shift on the iPhone) to limit the damage that blue light has on your brain.

5. Focus on Your Top Priorities

Oftentimes, stress stems from neglected priorities. Have you not been prioritizing your home life, relationships, or well-being? Remind yourself of what really matters in life and what is most important to you.

Successful creatives are aware that their happiness is just as, if not more important than, work, and that happiness shouldn’t be ignored. By trying to achieve a good balance in your life, you can alter your whole outlook and prevent stress from bringing you down.

6. Forest Bathing

A lot of highly successful creatives deal with their stress by taking long walks in nature. Some even take this practice to heart by aimlessly wandering through the forest, an activity known as “forest bathing”.

While the concept of “going for a walk” outside may seem like an obvious remedy to older generations, new research around forest bathing reveals a long list of incredible cognitive benefits.

7. Get in Touch With Your Feelings

One of the best ways to keep burnouts from happening in the future is to recognize the emotionsthat come before them. Take note of the emotions associated with stress and attempt to steer yourself away from them before the true burnout sets in.

Don’t simply repress these suppressed emotions. Identify them, then face your stress, fatigue, and demotivation head on in order to fully release them and remove the control they have over your behaviour and mood.

8. Take Responsibility for Yourself

It is rather tempting to push the blame for how you are feeling onto others. However, truly successful people know how to take responsibility for themselves and their reactions.

This does not mean you should waste your time blaming yourself for your stress, but rather, work toward changing the way you see anxiety. You have control over your situation.

9. Work Out

Try scheduling time to exercise on a daily basis. In the middle of a total burnout, this is one of the best things you can do. Both the mental and physical fatigue that accompany stress can make this difficult.

However, exercising releases endorphins that can reduce this tiredness and limit stress. Doing something as simple as stretching outside for 20 minutes can make all the difference and give you some necessary clarity about whatever is stressing you.

10. Adjust Your Attitude

The area where successful people truly differ from everyone else is in their attitude. We, as humans, can easily fall into a spiral of negative emotions that can quickly get out of control and only make us feel worse.

Though the presence of stress cannot be changed, what can be changed is your mindset. Instead of focusing on the negative, try to think of the positives.

Tell yourself that you can make the changes to get over this anxiety and ask yourself what you can learn from the experience. This is the best way to move forward quickly.